And It's Magic
by norickayer
Summary: "Billy, tell your patron god to stop stealing my pop-tarts!" Kate demands, brandishing an empty Pop-Tart box. "Loki can't be my patron god," Billy reminds her, "I'm Jewish." Loki makes a 'hurt' face. "You wound me, Billy." "Not as much as I will if you don't stop stealing my stuff," Kate warns, throwing the box into Loki's face. (Young Avengers Magic AU, circa Volume 2)


_**Characters**__: Teddy, Billy, Loki, Kate  
><em>_**Pairings**__: Teddy Altman/Billy Kaplan  
><em>_**Warnings**__: none  
><em>_**Notes**__: you can't tell me this is more ridiculous than canon_

Even taking magic into account, Loki still isn't sure how it's possible for Teddy to be half-werewolf and half-vampire. The two species can barely reproduce as it is! It shouldn't be biologically possible to reproduce _together_, even without the centuries-long bloodfeud between the two.

Vampires aren't even properly alive, for Odin's sake!

See, this is why Loki is pretty sure Teddy's existence is somehow artificial. And ok, it's seeming less and less likely that Billy poof-ed him into existence, but that doesn't rule out other weird magic. Maybe Mar-Vell was cursed with fertility at some point, or maybe there's a prophesy or something.

Being a pagan god unfortunately does not give Loki much insight into such matters. His worshippers didn't tend to bother with fortune-telling or fertility spells. That was more Freyja's domain.

"How are you even possible," Loki demands at breakfast, and Teddy just shakes his head.

"I've given up trying to figure it out. Billy has no idea. Even _Noh-Varr_ doesn't care anymore. So why are you still so obsessed with this?"

Loki doesn't know how to express that shapeshifters are _his_, and if there's anything about them that he doesn't understand, something is incredibly wrong with the world. Instead, he finishes his stack of pancakes and stalks out of the kitchen, leaving someone else to clean up his mess.

"You should pledge yourself to me," Loki suggest idly, sipping a champagne flute. He looks about 14, so instead of looking refined or sophisticated, he looks like a child stealing sips of his mother's drink.

"How many ways can I say 'no'?" Billy asks rhetorically, glancing around the club. "There's got to be another way."

Loki sets the glass down on the table. "I wouldn't be a terrible patron," he wheedles, "I have _hundreds_ of followers in America, you know." Billy looks doubtful, and Loki isn't about to tell him that they aren't so much devotees as twitter followers. "Becoming your patron god would allow me access to your magic to complete the spell-"

"NO!" Billy, Teddy, and America chorus.

Loki crosses his arms in frustration and sinks down into the booth.

Kate is quite possibly the least magical person Loki has ever met. Clint Barton comes close, but even he has been around magical creatures, spells, and constructs for so long that some of it has rubbed off on him, allowing him supernaturally good (and, at times, bad) luck. Don't try to tell _him_ that, of course.

One might expect this to annoy Loki, being a pagan god himself, but he actually quite likes Kate. She doesn't share his feelings, of course, but Loki knows that she serves a vital function on the team. She's the skeptic. She is there to ground the others, to fail to be awed by glitter and gleam. Loki is the god of many things, and among them are the malcontented. Although she would never devote herself to his worship, he is her patron in the abstract, for as long as she asks uncomfortable questions and refuses to let sleeping dogs lie. With a shapeshifter, a reality warper, and her, it's no wonder he wanted to reform the Young Avengers so badly.

She looks up to see him watching her, and sharpens her arrowhead more aggressively (if such a thing is possible), locking eyes with him as if to say '_Behave_.'

Of course he will. Iron arrowheads are impervious to most magic, which makes her, by some accounts, the most dangerous of them all.

"Billy, tell your patron god to stop stealing my pop-tarts!" Kate demands, brandishing an empty Pop-Tart box.

"Loki can't be my patron god," Billy reminds her, "I'm Jewish."

Loki makes a 'hurt' face. "You wound me, Billy."

"Not as much as I will if you don't stop stealing my stuff," Kate warns, throwing the box into Loki's face.

Life would be way easier if Loki was Billy's patron god. Loki and Mother are evenly-matched, magically speaking. Both hail from pagan pantheons of about the same age, after all: Loki, from the Norse, and Mother, from the fair folk of the British Isles. If Loki had magical jurisdiction over Billy, Mother would have to back off. Unfortunately, by the rules of magic, she does actually have more of a claim on Billy than he does: Billy and his twin were spirited away as infants and raised unawares by other families. Changlings are always a little fae-touched, even if they aren't witches, and Billy's magic marks him as fae-touched just as surely as Tommy's white hair does.

Loki might have made a bad decision in teaming up with the Mother. Actually, working with her and double-crossing her are both competing for the title of 'worst decision made in the past four months'. (The title of 'worst decision Loki ever made' is already spoken for.)

'_You only have yourself to blame_,' the shade of his former self reminds him. Loki bites back the obvious retort, in deference to their audience.

If Mother doesn't kill Loki for this, the spirit left behind when he took over the body of his reincarnation just might.

But Mother is the more pressing problem. If only Loki knew Mother's real name, he'd have an advantage that just might get her off their backs.

"We're going to need more salt," Loki tells Kate, "and possibly iron."

"I don't like where this is going, and you're probably going to die of sodium overdose," Kate replies. "One person is not meant to eat that much bacon."

"I AM A NORSE GOD," Loki cries, because no one seems to respect that anymore. He likes Kate, but he'll be damned if a human threatens his bacon supply.

"How's that going for you?" Teddy asks politely, continuing to drink his coffee and not otherwise reacting to Loki's outburst.

"Not great, at the moment," Loki sulks, "How's being a perverse freak of nature?"

Teddy looks over at Billy. He reaches a hand out and covers Billy's hand with his own.

"It's going pretty well actually," he answers.


End file.
